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Many days a week, Mohamed ‘Momo’ Ag Malha walks at least 7 miles (11km) around the vast Mbera refugee camp in southeastern Mauritania that has been his residence since 2012. The exercise keeps the 84-year-old camp elder healthy in mind and body, and allows him to check on the welfare of other residents.

His initial stay in Mauritania came in 1991, when he fled Mali as Tuareg separatists fought with the army in his home Timbuktu region.

After four years as a refugee, he went back and worked for a year as a community worker before transitioning to a teacher. Then in 2012, the Tuareg unrest once again forced him across the border.

The former math and science teacher says he feels deeply sympathetic for the young inhabitants of Mbera, which is located approximately 30 miles from the Malian border.

“Some of the kids who were born here in Mbera have not once visited Mali,” he says. “They do not know their nation [and] that is difficult because a refugee always has split affections: one here, where he lives, and another over there, in his homeland, which he dreams of returning to one day.”

Originally planned as a few thousand dwellings, Mbera now accommodates around 120,000 refugees, according to UNHCR. In also, it is estimated that at least 154,000 refugees dwell in nearby villages across the Hodh Ech Chargui region. More than half are under 18.

Government representatives say the area is the third largest human community in Mauritania after Nouakchott and Nouadhibou, the governmental and business centers.

Each month, thousands more refugees come across the border, escaping a extremist rebellion that hijacked the Tuareg rebellion and has since left extensive areas of the country ungovernable. Aid workers – notably at the UN World Food Programme (WFP) and Unicef office in the town of Bassikounou, which supports the camp and nearby settlements – cannot stop being concerned. They have faced declining resources as foreign donors – most notably the now discontinued USAID – have sharply reduced funding this year.

“We’ve gone from [being able to] help almost 90,000 people with both nutritional aid or money every month to about 53,000 … and had to discontinue vital nutrition programmes for undernourished children and mothers due to funding cuts,” says Aliou Diongue, country director for WFP.

The camp has many of the characteristics of a long-term settlement, including its own financial institution, eight schools, a market with more than 500 outlets, and volleyball and football initiatives. Members of a parent-teacher association use amplifiers to get more children signed up in school. New entrants are registered by aid workers and state agents using digital identification.

Nearby, gendarmerie patrols secure the camp from the danger of fighters just a few miles from the border.

Some residents have taken on new duties with enthusiasm: volunteers in the SOS Desert organisation grow crops for sale and run an anti-fire brigade putting out bushfires; members of a women’s resource network support those injured by jihadist attacks and mothers-to-be while also spreading awareness about teaching girls.

But the camp’s requirements are evident.

“We have the desire, we have the women, but not enough financial support or materials,” a leading member of the network says. “Sometimes we recycle what little we have, but it is not enough for the needs of the camp.”

In the schools, the children are provided one meal daily by WFP. At one school with 100 children per class, six or seven of them gather by a big tray to eat the same meal every school day – rice that is largely basic, save for a few beans.

“We’re still providing school meals, staple provisions, and cash assistance in the Mbera camp, but it’s not enough,” says Diongue. “We’re concentrating on the most vulnerable while working relentlessly to secure new funding through the diversification of our donor base.”

The meals are supported by recent gifts including several thousand tonnes of rice donated by the South Korean government – the only products in a majority of the warehouses. A few donors are also helping initiate self-sufficiency programmes to help refugees farm and rear animals so they can make money and boost their quality of life.

Though Malha oversees everything conscientiously, helping the aid workers’ cater to the most vulnerable households, his heart aches to return to Mali.

“When you leave your country, you sacrifice everything – your work, your home, your family sometimes,” he says. “Here, you depend only on humanitarian aid. Sometimes that aid is enough, sometimes it is not. And when it is not, you struggle.

“We thank the Mauritanian authorities and the humanitarian organisations for what they have done for us but it is not the same as being in your own country, working with your own hands and living with pride.”